Friday, April 5, 2013

Calling the Critics Crazy: South Africa, Berkeley, and Bradley Manning

On Thursday in the South African history
course for which I teach discussion sections, I showed Walter Cronkite’s 1987
documentary, Children of Apartheid, a
deeply moving set of interviews with children and young people across various
sectors of South Africa’s highly fractured society.

There was no shortage of jarring or
memorable moments captured on camera in the course of interviews with black,
white and coloured youth ranging in age from ten to twenty-seven, but one of
the moments that stood out most to me was the juxtaposition of two prominent
daughters of apartheid.Cronkite spoke with the daughters of Nelson
Mandela (then imprisoned on Robben Island) and P W Botha (the State President
of South Africa).Both were twenty-seven
years of age.

The former was an eloquent, thoughtful
young woman who provided clear-eyed analysis of the moral contradictions of the
apartheid system, and moving
testimony about her own upbringing—thanks to first the activism of her parents,
and then her own—had been shaped by its social engineering.The latter came across as a ditsy socialite,
utterly uncurious and unfathomably unaware, claiming that any South African,
black or white, could come up to her father and speak their mind to him.That might have been the most laughable of Botha’s
utterances, but the one that left me thinking the most came when Cronkite asked
her about the activism of black students on the streets.“You don’t need to shout slogans and wave
banners and carry on line a madman”, she said, exasperatedly.

There are plenty of problems with that
sentence, but it was the “madman” that caught my ear...the idea that those
protesting a system which transformed them into second-class non-citizens were
somehow addled.

I was reminded of a different version of
the same rhetoric.It came a few years
ago on Berkeley’s campus, at a time when students were facing regular 10-20%
tuition increases.A group of students
got onto the balcony of Wheeler Hall one evening and chained themselves to the
railings in protest, also occupying a classroom on an upper floor.That night, probably upwards of a thousand
students gathered to show our support outside the building which was surrounded
by hundreds of police.UC Berkeley’s
administration (which in the course of a different protest had referred to
demonstrators as “a health and safety issue”...I treasure these rhetorical gems
from our outgoing Chancellor who combines the eloquence of George W Bush with the
competence of, well, George W Bush) called up a university psychologist to reason
with the students.

Now call me crazy, but that was a move both insulting and telling.Insulting because it suggests that the
students were somehow irrational in their actions, and that they were not
speaking out against concrete social and economic policies with which they
disagreed strongly.And telling because it
is a move which plays into the perception that good citizens toe the line and
don’t ask questions, whereas those who rock the boat are dangerous outliers.

I don’t know whether in this case the
decision to delegitimize the protestors by calling their rationality into
question was a deliberate strategy of campus administrators.On the one hand they seem too disorganised to
have developed a comprehensive strategy, and I believe that some of them labour
under the delusion that they genuinely know students’ interests better than
those students do themselves.On the
other hand, they have spent massive sums of money hiring dozens of six-figure consultants
over the past several years, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of those were
charged with working out how to contain student discontent.

-----

But there is little doubt that there was
a deliberately orchestrated campaign to call into question the sanity of another
of our society’s victims—Bradley Manning, the soldier responsible for leaking
documents exposing the inner workings of our national security apparatus to the
public.Once it became known that
Manning was responsible for the leak, the government set about defaming the
young soldier.President Obama permitted
his administration to use Manning’s sexuality as a way of undermining the
soldier.The administration and the military
also went after Manning’s sanity.

By all accounts, Manning struggled in
the military, exhibiting signs of breakdown, something probably very common
amongst men and women serving an institution known for creating conditions ripe
for abuse, humiliation, and violence.By
questioning Manning’s sanity before he had even been charged with anything, the
administration and the military not only prejudiced any justice Manning might
ever receive at the hands of the self-serving U.S. military, but created a
kangaroo court in the public sphere designed to distract attention from the
substance of the wikileaks revelations and the character of Manning’s
actions.

And then, as though bent on re-writing
reality, these authorities proceeded to do everything in their power to drive
him crazy.They treated this young man—who
exposed immorality, incompetence, hypocrisy, criminality, and the treacherous
activities of our government—in the same way they would someone plotting to
bomb an American city.Our government
detained him, isolated him, humiliated him, drugged him, interrogated him, and,
by its own sometime standards, tortured him.

Manning, whose sin was to help the Obama
administration fulfil its since-abandoned hollow pledge to become the most open
and transparent administration in history, was turned into a public enemy
number-one.He and Wikileaks became the
subject of extraordinary vitriol emanating from Hillary Clinton’s State
Department, Congress, and the Pentagon.He was called a traitor.Manning
has not attempted to duck responsibility for his actions, and accepted guilt
for, among other things, “having
possessed and wilfully communicated to an unauthorised person all the main
elements of the Wikileaks disclosure”.But he contends that he is not guilty of “aiding the enemy”.

In
his recent testimony, Manning expressed his hope that “detailed analysis of
the [leaked] data over a long period of time by different sectors of society
might cause society to re-evaluate the need or even the desire to engage in
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex
dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday”.As he examined the intelligence cables, he
became “fascinated with the way that we dealt with other nations and
organizations.I also began to think the
documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn’t seem
characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world”.Those do not sound like the machinations of a
sinister traitor plotting to bring our country down.In fact, they sound more thoughtful and
logical than the slack-jawed, idle-minded approach to international affairs taken
by our President or his predecessor.

Now there was a time in our history when
whistleblowers were heroes.Journalists
who documented the abuse of power by a president were feted, and tobacco
industry employees who exposed the appalling machinations of their companies
were praised.

In truth, Manning did exactly what we
ostensibly expect of good citizens.An
idealistic young man, he joined the military to serve his country and further
his studies.In a harrowing place in
harrowing conditions, he identified a problem, he witnessed moral wrongs.And instead of emulating most of those around
him who buried their heads in the sand, or who looked without seeing, or laughed
and played along, he acted.He took the
initiative to right what in his view was a wrong.He decided that the public interest
transcended the narrow interest of our national security and foreign policy elite.He took the apparently very novel view that
people have a right to know what their government does in their name, and that an
informed public is a good thing.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.